Categories: weblog | Religion
Hinduism, LDS, and other religions
# (6) 07 Mar 2008, 08:05AM: San Antonio?:
I've never been to San Antonio, even though much of the Walch clan lives there. I guess the time was never right with school and all. Then today I saw Gordon Atkinson invite me to a Franciscan retreat at his church in San Antonio. Given that I look on with yearning at Rivka's SUUSI reports, this retreat could be a good way to ease myself into the spiritual retreat scene. And it would be an excuse to visit Kristen, Aaron, Lily, Gunnar, Anne, and who knows who else?!
Now I just need for my company to send me to conferences in Salt Lake City, Tallahassee, Seattle, Portland, Portland, Chicago, Bryn Mawr, Boston, Atlanta, London, Cambridge, Charlottesville, Mysore, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, Radovljica, Baltimore, and I suppose Los Angeles, so I can piggyback all my friends-and-family visits. (Tell me if I missed you.)
# 16 Feb 2008, 12:00PM: Tax History Saved For A Future Post:
In the last few months, I've seen and read a few things and had opinions on them. Here we go.
I Chose a Parson is a 1956 memoir by Phyllis Stark, an American woman who went to Gustavus Adolphus College, married a seminary student, had two kids, and helped her husband as he rose to a bishopric in the Episcopal Church. I got it for a few bucks at Sam Weller's in Salt Lake City, in the cheapo-books room crowded with out-of-print manuals and histories and children's primers, where the pipe on the ceiling's dripping into a bucket on the floor. Never was there a greater diamond in the muck. Stark writes with the dry eloquence of the Brits and the earthy humor of the Midwest, and every page has a great anecdote. I kept reading stuff to Leonard:
In the original list of repairs new pews had been included, but later that item had been deleted because, as usual, expenses were exceeding the original estimates. I felt very strongly, however, that the new beauty we were seeking to achieve would be completely lost if the crude and wretchedly uncomfortable pews were to remain. With the hope of persuading Leland to press the point, I presented the case to him a good many times, but without success. Then one day I decided to drop my reasoned approach and try instead a more feminine technique.
'Darling,' I said sweetly, 'I've got my heart set on new pews.'
He pulled me up short with the trenchant reply, 'That, my dear, is the only part of your anatomy that will ever set on new pews.'
I'm glad to say, however, that the other members of the committee were more amenable to my importuning, and before the repair work was finished, not only did we have new pews, but also new kneelers upholstered with the best quality surgical foam rubber!
I think Rivka and Rachel would especially like this book. And I have more to quote from it in another entry.
Ratatouille is good. The animation of water is amazing. I got creeped out by all the rats. The critic's flashback is moving.
Juno is not the most comfortable movie to watch with my Mormon in-laws. The banter is great and all the actors were spot-on. I could have done with a less monotonous soundtrack. For the first half of the movie Jason Bateman is basically Michael Bluth, but he and Michael Cera really break out. Ellen Page makes me want to see the upcoming Smart People which is evidently this year's Little Miss Sunshine. Some people find Juno's choice to bear the child unbelievable, but I can see a bunch of reasons, implied strongly or subtly, why she'd do that. However, I do want to find a comedy-drama that is specifically about abortion, just to see if it can be done.
An Affair To Remember: Leonard and I saw the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr version. All the annoying plot devices of screwball comedy without actual chemistry. That Italy scene takes forever! And the second half is a huge Idiot Plot. From my recollection Sleepless in Seattle is a much better film.
An American In Paris: I had an argument with Will Franken about this movie. I couldn't stand it because the lead, Jerry Mulligan, is a sleazeball stalker. Evidently Will wishes men could be more "romantic" in that manner today and feels castrated by feminism and the need to take a single rejection as a final rejection. I pointed out that I've been the aggressor in every romantic relationship I've ever had, and have been rejected many, many times. And yet somehow I got a husband without stalking him! And lots of men and women find each other without sexually harrassing each other!
Will asked, basically, what if it's love? What if you're in love with someone and they don't love you back? Isn't it just and true to persist in professing your love? The answer is no and it's a contradictory question anyhow. One-way romantic "love" is obsession, infatuation, lust; love is a conversation, two minds meeting as one. And how can you love someone if you don't respect their wishes (namely, "stop asking me out")?
The average Futurama is better sci-fi than the average Star Trek: Voyager.
Scott Westerfeld's Uglies is great, easy-to-read teen-focused sci-fi. The characters make sense while growing and displaying new depths, the worldbuilding is exciting, the action scenes and dialogue are all page-turners, and now I have another trilogy to finish, which I can't afford right now. See you again in May, Westerfeld.
If you can believe it, The Matrix was on American Movie Classics the other day. This is kind of embarrassing for me. I taught The Matrix enthusiastically in my Politics in Modern Sci-Fi class and in my prior Politics of the Midlife Crisis class. I still think the plot and visuals are fun and interesting, but most of the dialogue and acting hasn't held up well for me. I do still like Keanu Reeves's part, though.
The September 11th film anthology was on Sundance and I TiVo'd it mainly to watch Inarritu's segment. It was unbearably evocative and I couldn't watch the whole thing. The whole collection is worthwhile: see it with Brendan and followed by the original Shall We Dance?
# 28 Jan 2008, 12:29AM: Condolences:
My condolences to my LDS family and readers on the death of Gordon B. Hinckley.
# 25 Dec 2007, 09:40AM: OMG Squee:
Yesterday I got David Neeleman's autograph. Rock! I was just stretching my legs walking the aisle around hour three of the flight when I saw a familiar-looking man in a yellow sweater talking with kids and flight attendants in the back of the plane. I approached, and it was him! Oh, how fannishly I gushed. A little while later he did the gladhanding walk through the plane.
Neeleman is LDS, and his religious values are part of why JetBlue uses distributed call centers for customer service (think eBlocks). He thought it would be good for families if moms could work from home and earn money while taking care of their homes and kids. Lots of JetBlue customer service personnel are housewives in Salt Lake City and environs.
# 24 Dec 2007, 02:14AM: Goodwill:
Another response to an old pal, this one more than a year in the waiting.
Last year, Zed Lopez criticized me for being -- as I perceived it -- pro-happiness, pro-togetherness, pro-tolerance etc. I'd enjoyed some language in a speech by Barack Obama on religion and politics. Mr. Lopez, among others, was unhappy with the talk because they thought he was being too soft on those who want to increase or legitimize the role of Christianity in public life.
I don't dispute that religious fundamentalism is real and dangerous in the US. And it's not like I've always been on the winning side of the culture wars.
At the time, I was basically happy with Obama's speech because of my preference for civility and hope -- Mr. Obama had made a speech that I read as pro-hope and pro-connection, as Walter Holland put more eloquently at the time. Andrew Sullivan* in The Atlantic Monthly this month:
To be able to express this kind of religious conviction without disturbing or alienating the growing phalanx of secular voters, especially on the left, is quite an achievement.
But Mr. Sullivan's not getting that right, because Obama did alienate secular voters with that speech. And Mr. Lopez was one of them. He saw the speech as "advocating not being so darn persnickety about keeping religion out of school and government." What? No! At least, 90% of the speech wasn't about that. More on the other 10% in a few paragraphs.
I think part of what Mr. Obama was saying was that we have a natural tendency to listen better to people who make an effort to connect to our legitimate sentiments. To take that further, I have a natural tendency to listen a little better to people who don't literally insult me. In explaining his distaste for Mr. Obama's message, Mr. Lopez linked to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who, admittedly as a wounded person the day after the 2004 election, blew up at me for no fault of mine. And scorn, cross words, etc. are usual for him. So I was discounting his opinions pretty heavily (despite earlier progress).
This fall, Leonard got to hang out with Mr. Nielsen Hayden at Viable Paradise, and says he's an all-right guy. So I'm taking that into account now. And from a later comment of his, praising Scott Rosenberg's work, I can tell that "f*** you" doesn't mean to him what it does to me; part of the reason I had been offended was on behalf of my old colleague's honor. And Scott Rosenberg can obviously defend himself.
This is maybe why this post has been germinating in my drafts pocket for a year and a half; I wanted to disengage from the hostility I felt and that one of the participants in this dialogue expressed, but still address it.
Now, 17 months later, Mitt Romney has said bigoted things about nontheists. Not just our party's values share roots and expression with religious values, but
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom....Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
The followup: "A spokesman for the Mitt Romney campaign is thus far refusing to say whether Romney sees any positive role in America for atheists and other non-believers..." Wrongheaded, delusional, and completely the opposite of Mr. Obama's speech; dividing America instead of reaching out. If you think the Democrats should watch out for the slippery slope of reaching out to religious constituents, listen to Mr. Romney:
We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders - in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history...
Well, he's eliding the deism of the founders, and the fact that "under God" got inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s, and that our currency started its God-fearing ways during the Civil War, and that of course there's no way to teach world or US history without talking about religion and no one is seriously arguing that mentioning the Quakers in a public school is going to get a teacher fired. But more than that: these are government policy proposals and positions. Not just possible implications, not just likely or unlikely readings, but flat-out stated "the government should do this." And gah!
Okay, we disagree on how we read Mr. Obama's speech. But he's Michael Newdow compared to Mitt Romney. And this is including the most disagreeable passage in Mr. Obama's talk:
But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation - context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase "under God." I didn't. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs - targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers - that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.
I can see both sides of the latter two points, but come on about the Pledge. It's just idiotic to think that "under God" belongs in a required public school pledge; it's there because of inertia and because it's a wedge issue.
The really important places where church encroaches upon state are like the ones Mr. Lopez mentions -- atheists, Jews, etc. harassed at public schools and the Air Force Academy, denied jobs or promotions at state and federal agencies, and so on. Those are obviously wrong and all reasonable people understand and object. The borderline bits that Mr. Obama mentions above are more controversial, and get more press, frustrating and dividing moderates. Mr. Nielsen Hayden had a similar problem with Mr. Obama's speech ("yes, I caught his obligatory dance-of-even-handedness....what aspects of his speech got covered in the national media?"): he believed it played into the hands of bigots.
How problematic is that? Well, it seems I've come across both sides of Postel's Law. I need to work on being more open and sensitive in my readings of other people's thoughts, and I (especially powerful I twenty years from now) need to take exceptional care in my words and their implications.
Perhaps the best symbol of church-state transcendence is the secular sainthood my generation has draped upon the Rev. Fred Rogers, as evidenced in the comments for the goodbye video from Mr. Rogers. He saw that TV was crap, so he worked to improve it for the sake of children everywhere. On his public television show he never proselytized, though he was an ordained Presbyterian minister. And talk about Postel's Law! He listened to kids' fears so he could comfort them, which is why he sang that song about how you don't have to worry about being sucked down the bathtub drain. And just try to find an instance where he said an unkind word to anyone, or something that even out of context sounds bad.
He listened and spoke carefully and well, even when addressing political issues (PBS funding, Sony v. Betamax). I gotta get on that. Right speech is part of right living. And that's what I've been struggling with over that 17-month-old keynote. Did I divide myself from a friend by celebrating inclusiveness? If most of its ideas are technically correct or even incisive, but an effect of it isn't, then is it right speech? And then there's the basic skill of calmly listening to people who disagree with me. Which reminds me of the bit of that controversial speech that I liked the best, and quoted the first time around:
A hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all.
Merry Christmas, and happy holidays.
* Note that Sullivan's article mistakenly places the speech in June of 2007, not last year.
# (1) 26 Feb 2007, 04:10PM: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water:
"What about taking Communion moves you so much?"
In one gesture it sort of sums up the craziness and beauty of human life, which is that you are a soul in a piece of meat, you know? You are a soul in a body. You are bound to other bodies by the fact of your body, by eating and drinking, which are among the most basic human functions. And yet you are also a soul.
# 05 Dec 2006, 12:07AM: Epistemology, Utilitarianism:
Sometimes I ask, "Is this true?" Sometimes I ask, "Is this useful?" But in either case I wonder whether my actions are true or useful.
# 27 Oct 2006, 01:46PM: Quizzified:
A US woman has the last name as a pretty durn famous US theologian, and has never heard of him.
# 09 Oct 2006, 11:19PM: Wanted:
An eruv for free speech zones.
# 08 Oct 2006, 02:08AM: "How do you remember a truth that will cause clinical depression?":
Are these the lessons of Auschwitz? What else must I be sure to recognize?
Our moral hearts, like our physical ones, are weak and prone to disease. If we acknowledge this and determine to exercise them, we have a chance to live. If we deny it and insist our hearts are failure-proof, we let the disease in at the door.
Like fragments of a hologram, each of us contains an image of the whole of our species; each of us participates in all of the beauty and all the evil of being human. We all participate in the music of Mozart and the murderousness of Mengele. If, in the morning, you look in the mirror and you say, "I have the face of a murderer," you have placed yourself in a position to begin the work that needs to be done.
# 05 Oct 2006, 05:09PM: Julia Sweeney Coming Back:
Julia Sweeney's amazing show "Letting Go of God" is returning to Ars Nova starting Oct. 19th. It closes on Oct. 29th. I'd love to see it again.
# 21 Sep 2006, 12:09PM: Temple Management:
Leonard and I had another wedding ceremony on Sunday; my parents were in town and wanted to see us get hitched Hindu-style. We capped off the rituals with a visit to a Ganesha-centric temple in Flushing. As I watched my parents pay a cashier, then show a receipt to a priest to request a ritual, I thought about how many temples don't even have that level of organization. Business-speak follows:
Hindu temples, like many organizations, would like to switch from cash/paper payment systems to more efficient payment tracking mechanisms. As they grow, priests stop having personal relationships with worshippers, and become labor in centralized, scheduled ritual performance. Retrofitting existing temple payment and scheduling systems for growth, efficiency, and electronics is frustrating. Most of these places face zoning and funding barriers. Right now there's a Hundi (donation box) next to each idol; donating money towards a particular god has important ritual meaning. But how much time and trust has to be spent in collecting and counting that cash money?
Temples need a holistic evaluation of their needs to determine where technology could help. Perhaps all worship stations could come equipped with smartcard-reading kiosks. Or maybe a centralized point-of-sale station, accepting credit cards and cash, could print receipts, horoscopes, ritual-completion certificates, and lists of suggested rituals. The solution must allow for at least some cash donations, non-native English speakers (preferably with support for all 14 Indian languages), and a greasy, smoky environment. (Ix-nay on the touchscreens?)
Ben suggested that such a system could even email worshippers to remind them of Today's Sanskrit Chant To-Do List. However, he and Leonard both noted that temples don't think they need this system. Talk about a barrier to sales.
So if I wanted to use this idea for my Master's project, I'd have to spend time learning this domain from the people who run Hindu temples, and whom I don't find the most likeable people in the world. And then I'd have to consider educating them about their needs so I could sell them on my whiz-bang POS or whatever. I find this opportunity technically and socially interesting, but not enough to overcome the business and social irritations. NEXT.
# 13 Aug 2006, 11:01PM: Means of Production:
The Poor Man says funny things about Mel Gibson and Daniel Davies causes me to enter this post in three of my four blog categories (Comedy, Religion, and Taxes).
If Leonard leaves the house, I find it easier to clean. Why is this? Other people who live with spouses or significant others: can you comment?
Anyway, that means that I had a spasm of cleaning today. Also, today I wrote and almost finished a new column on a funny problem with a naturalization exam study sheet. Well, that's where it starts, anyway.
# 13 Aug 2006, 10:12PM: Reality Check:
Residents of the USA: 2/3 self-identified white, around 76% self-identified Christian. In both cases, lower than I'd thought.
# 02 Jul 2006, 09:38AM: Sumana Dismisses Dilettantes, Including Herself, in MC Masala:
When your religion is someone else's tourist attraction.
I once told my mother that I was becoming a Buddhist and renouncing worldly things. This was fine with her until I declared that this also applied to eating dinner. My ploy to avoid eating failed spectacularly.
# 13 Jun 2006, 09:35AM: Old Religion, New Tradition:
U.S. Muslims Confront Taboo on Nursing Homes. One community leader is building a nursing home attached to a mosque, to make the transition easier. Good for him.
# 28 Mar 2006, 06:24PM: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.":
"[Mr. Rogers] did tell me that he considered the space between the television set and the viewer holy ground..."
"...[I] saw that my son's eyes were darting, the way they do when he is nervous. He'd researched, made a decision and spoken it aloud. This had cost him."
And then, found because a Joel Spolsky fan said "Verba Volant, Scripta Manent": a liberal blog reminding us of a Borges line:
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
# 23 Mar 2006, 08:23AM: A New Theodicy:
"If you don't like it, file a bug with God."
"That's it! The reason that bad things happen is that God doesn't have a copy of FogBugz."
# 28 Dec 2005, 11:21PM: MC Masala Reprint:
This week's column got published Sunday, Christmas Day. So they reprinted the column I'd written back in July, about my interest in Christianity.
# 26 Dec 2005, 11:09PM: The Irregular, Finite, Fantastic Golden Braid:
When I was in sixth grade, I got a bookmark at school that displayed the twenty-six letters of the alphabet in American Sign Language. Somehow, starting with that, I have now filled and overflowed a shoebox with hundreds of bookmarks. I doubt I'll have time in the next few weeks to properly sort and label the things. Someday, after I put up my travelogue for the first time I ever visited New York, and after I've moved there.
What a tremendously baroque civilization we have! At first bookmarks were ribbons sewn into the bindings of books. Then they were pasteboard advertisements for patent cures and the like. Now they are paper and plastic and metal, ads for everything and nothing, fanciful clips, inspirations and tassels. So much human energy has been poured into my little shoebox, so much effort to keep me from having to dogear or remember a page number.
The Holy Tango of Poetry. Search requests in a certain order. Sometimes the beautiful complications of the world that we've created together just overwhelm me. I should lay down and rest in this beautiful world.
# 09 Dec 2005, 07:37PM: The Escalator Of Reason:
Hasidic Rebel (who redesigned and started writing again this month) once found himself explaining to his more orthodox wife that learning the arguments against her beliefs might change her beliefs. Perhaps wisely (for her own peace of mind), she told him to keep them from her. I'm reminded of that curious conflict -- which I probably first saw articulated in a tiny story within the ancillary material in a copy of Candide -- when I read this bit of Peter Singer. For good and for ill, it's quite difficult to retreat from unpleasant yet logical conclusions once you start thinking clearly.
# 04 Dec 2005, 09:37AM: Articles You Might Enjoy:
At http://www.insidebayarea.com/bayarealiving/ci_3278439 we have my new MC Masala on sitting on BART with my eyes closed. "....I'm not very disciplined, so I have to close my eyes to ignore the outside world...."
And at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04coach.html we have a NYT story about college football, which sounds boring until you find out that it is by Michael Lewis. It is hysterical.
# 25 Nov 2005, 02:30PM: Links For A Long Weekend:
Last year, I received a holiday present from an person I'd never met, sent to my work address. It was We, a dystopia by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was a great gift, catering to my interests in Russia, sci-fi, and politics, despite the fact that I had already read We. So, the moral of the story.
When are church members, especially bloggers, allowed to criticize church leaders? There was a guy named Martin Luther who answered this question rather a while back.
Hugo Schwyzer, in telling us that atonement theory drew him to Christianity, wrote: "I first came to love Jesus because He died for me, not because some progressive preacher told me that he 'successfully embodied a radical new ethic of inclusiveness and community!'." And that reminded me of something Seth had written: "One thing I notice is that only a tiny percentage of people who call doctrines they don't believe inspirational will spend any significant amount of time studying them for inspiration."
Finally, two of the most appealing pop-culture Christians of recent times -- Fred Rogers and Johnny Cash.
# 06 Nov 2005, 11:48AM: Bay Buffet:
Just talked to my mom about, among other things, Hindu temples in San Francisco. It's good to know which ones are run by Hare Krishna/ISKCON, which ones are rabidly Vaishnavite/Saivite/whatever, and which ones are primarily spaces for intellectual contemplation. The temples in Livermore, Sunnyvale, Fremont, etc., which the nineties Indian diaspora built, are places where kids run around and Indians chant while dripping ghee onto idols. A "Vedanta Center" is more like a garden/bookstore combo where white people learn yoga. In my experience. Mom says I could enjoy the Palaniswami Temple and Shri Swaminarayan Mandir.
# 06 Nov 2005, 08:49AM: Comedy = Tragedy + Paradigm Shift:
Leonard's relative Nate Oman is always saying interesting things. Example: "I have always had a soft spot for Prometheus. I figure that to a greater or lesser extent we are probably going to basically fail at most everything that we do. That being the case, fail big. Set yourself a monstrous goal like toppling divinity and go down heroically, I say. The remarkable thing about Mormonism, of course, is that it takes the Prometheus story and retells it as comedy."
# 23 Oct 2005, 10:44PM: Didion on Schiavo:
You have probably already read Joan Didion on the Schiavo case and watched Didion illustrate, but carefully leave unanswered, more precisely formulated questions about that particular tragedy and the end of life. That piece makes me want to read Life's Dominion and The Year of Magical Thinking.
# 03 Oct 2005, 11:39AM: Memoirs Of A Puja:
MC Masala for this week takes you to a suburban house in boomtown Silicon Valley, a generic place where I remember spending every weekend in the 1990s.
Kids ran around the house, shrieking and playing, too young to behave for the length of the puja. But at the end their parents brought them back for the aarthi: Someone held a tray of oil lamps and moved around the room to bless each person by moving the tray in a clockwise direction three times. The flames danced and blurred. Everyone ate the prasada, the sweet communion pudding. Parents coached their kids on standing still, performing aarthi and giving and receiving with the right hand, never the left.
# 19 Sep 2005, 02:05PM: The Pearl Of Great Price:
I will own any label you please. Crackpot, dreamer, shoddy thinker, weak-minded. None of these matter for I have found the pearl of great price. And the transforming power of that discovery and of that joy lies at the center of my life.
Oh yeah, non-Mormon Christians have a PGP reference too.
# 01 Sep 2005, 10:13AM: Phillip Robertson Is Braver Than I'll Ever Be:
I have the freedom to yammer on about literature. I'm not in Iraq.
Hajji Qais had been on Al Mutanabbi street for 10 years and the vendors all knew him. He sold greeting cards for births and anniversaries along with Christmas and Easter gifts, cologne and pens. He wore a beard and was also known as a devout Sunni who had no problem hiring Shia workers or spending time with Christian colleagues. Aside from stocking a few items related to Christian holidays, there was nothing unusual in his shop. He wasn't a known member of any political party, and he was, according to his neighbors on Al Mutanabbi Street, a generous man who often gave money to the poor.
No one in the district will speak openly about who killed him, including his own son.
Ahmed Dulaimi, a young guitarist for Iraq's only heavy metal band, told a story that has been going around Baghdad these last few weeks. There was an ice seller selling ice from a small shop on the sidewalk in the Dora neighborhood. One hot day, a man came up to him with a gun and said, "You shouldn't be selling ice because the Prophet Mohammed didn't have ice in his time." Then the gunman shot the ice seller dead. This story terrifies Iraqis but they often laugh when they recount it, because it is absurd that anyone would get killed for selling ice or shaving a beard. It is also true that the ice-seller anecdote follows a pattern of killings around the capital where Islamic militants have regularly assassinated Iraqis for violating strict, and utterly random, codes of behavior. The point of the ice-seller story is that now, anyone in Iraq can be killed for any reason at all. After Hajji Qais was killed, more than one person mentioned these spontaneous assassinations, and they spoke about them the way they'd describe a sandstorm, an all-encompassing thing that no one can stop.
# 21 Jul 2005, 08:01AM: Christmas Column In July:
Today's MC Masala has second and third paragraphs that the Bay Area Living editor, Cathy Schutz, much improved. Thanks, Cathy.
In "Interfaith Dialogue Runs Aground" I recollect a party where I conversed with a former Christian:
The more we talked the less we understood each other. How could he sit with me, a block from the Mission District in San Francisco, eating Christmas pie, and not understand that my conscious citizenship in Western civilization demands that I get a handle on Christianity?
# 14 Jul 2005, 03:51AM: Sunset is to Nightfall as Insomnia is to Wikipedia:
Wowie zowie, there are some crazy people out there.
Other related modern theories involve Hitler having escaped to the Antarctic, where he joined with a subterranean dinosauroid master race, with whom he now travels inside UFOs underground, generally beneath the South Pole or throughout the center of the hollow earth, but sometimes to a Nazi moon base as well.
Includes the "avatar of Vishnu" theory and its proponent, who went on to write "a fictionalized autobiography and memoir of her favorite cats." Title: Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or the true story of a "most objectionable Nazi" and . . . half-a-dozen cats.
The history of the swastika is a brand manager's nightmare. Imagine you run a minor hockey team or a beloved cereal or an infantry division, and you've chosen as your logo lightning breaking jaggedly through a circle. Then the jihadists start using it! And off to CafePress you go.
What if some distasteful political movement started using swooshy corporate-style logos? What would it take for PBS or Coke to give up and flee?
Finally: Om saha naavavatu is one of the two mantras I know best, but I'd never seen it written down before. I've only heard my father cajoling large groups of Hindus into saying it before we dug into potluck dinners. Are there prayers like that for people who grew up Christian? Do you remember whether you said or sung them?
# 28 Jun 2005, 09:03AM: Eminem Domain:
More John on Kelo!
I'm glad y'all got a good price for the land. (I thought "arable" meant "good for farming.") But maybe your uncles were, you know, attached to the land. Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth taught me a little about that. The investments people make in land are not just monetary, just as a job is not just an exchange of time for money. We're humans and we make social and emotional attachments to pets, careers, neighbors, possessions, co-workers, and land. Cemeteries, places of worship, and awe-inspiring natural beauties are sacred land publicly, but each man's home is just as sacred to him.
Filed under:
ReligionTaxes
# 09 Jun 2005, 05:55PM: Still No Punchline:
I still have no punchline for the set-up "Asra Nomani is standing alone in Mecca..." But you can read my review of her book.
It seems unfair to judge Standing Alone in Mecca as a memoir when it's clearly unfinished. It tells us the history and the recent dispatches of battles within Islam, but the story's barely begun.
# 30 May 2005, 02:00PM: C.S. Lewis in Boulder, Colorado:
Celestial Seasonings rooibos tea features, on the box, a very calm lion drinking drom a teacup. Leonard observed, "So he is a tame lion."
# 09 May 2005, 09:44AM: This Morning On Diversity BART:
On my left, a woman read the New Testament on a PDA, probably a PalmPilot. On my right, a man with a yarmulke and a prayer shawl on his head strapped tefillin to his arms, prayed quietly, and then removed all his accoutrements and packed them away. He had a tattoo on one arm, which intrigues me, since I thought Orthodox Jews refused tattoos.
# 04 May 2005, 09:02AM: This One Goes In the "Comedy" And "Religion" Categories:
While in Utah, I got to meet many of Leonard's relatives, including the Omans. I got to tell them that I really enjoy Nate's posts on Times And Seasons. Today I read just such an example.
# 12 Apr 2005, 10:16PM: The Title Is Much Dirtier Than The Reality:
Bookslut needs columnists (check the left-hand sidebar). Many writers who read this journal would be ideal as Bookslut reviewers and columnists. Heck, Bookslut even accepted my review of Good Catholic Girls (the typos aren't mine).
# 24 Mar 2005, 01:40PM: Happy Purim!:
I hope those of you who celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim have a good time. I remember evincing amazement when my freshman-year roommate told me she was supposed to booze till she didn't know good from evil; now that seems completely normal to me. Oh no, I've defined deviancy down!
During some services on the "Jewish Mardi Gras", you get to boo when the rabbi mentions the villain's name. That's pretty awesome.
It is customary to hold carnival-like celebrations on Purim, to perform plays and parodies, and to hold beauty contests. I have heard that the usual prohibitions against cross-dressing are lifted during this holiday, but I am not certain about that.
# 22 Mar 2005, 10:14AM: We All Fall Down:
"A woman's battle for the soul of Islam" and "A 'virtuous pagan' looks at the priesthood" make it seem that every week Salon interviews an interesting woman who's thinking about Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) faith. I think that isn't true, but should be.
Emily Proctor quotes an Indianapolis bishop as saying, "Of course the church messes up. We have to mess up or else we would have to believe the Inquisition was a good thing." I love seeing officials of organized religion admit fallibility. Religious officials as a group tend to emphasize obedience and belief too much for my taste. For example, Bill Keller of LivePrayer will say that he's an imperfect servant of the Lord and that we're all depraved, sinful, and far from the mind of God, which rather makes me wonder why I should listen to him in particular when he tells me that he knows what the Lord wants from us. (His usual defense: circular arguments involving the Bible.)
I think it's a good thing that there is no one Pope governing Islam. Asra Nomani's local mosque isn't being very flexible (and ShaBot would not approve), but Islam as a whole can be. Witness the Spanish imams' fatwa against bin Laden and Nomani's Muslim Women's Freedom Tour.
Maybe a schism is coming. Maybe we'll have Sunni, Shiite, and Nomani Islam. Maybe the new flavor will descend into rigid hierarchy and one of its sects will launch an attack aginst an alien community on Mars. When I speculate about the future of these organized religions, I can't see how they can escape their cycles of schism and fundamentalism.
Geeks say of using "regular expressions" to solve certain computer problems that "now you have two problems." When politicians and religious activists try to solve problems, I feel lucky if they only double them. How do we finally get the bubble of air out from under the wallpaper instead of just moving it from side to side?
# 11 Mar 2005, 03:48PM: Question Marks:
Unitarian Universalist jokes and a Satanism joke: "Satanism seems to be an elaborate prank designed to annoy Christians while having some good parties ... rather than a system one could practically live by."
The classics AND contemporary media sometimes show people doing immoral things, and sometimes we see that these actions lead to their downfall. Kristen, you ask why certain books become classics, and whether classics that portray immoral behavior are smut. I've never understood what smut is. I think smut would be pornography that didn't care about a story or characters. The classics care about story.
Literature explores different ways of being human, as my old English teacher said. I realized, after reading George Eliot's classic Middlemarch and finding in Rosamond's character a reflection of myself, that I should be more emotionally independent and not a self-important parasite like her. But that's not because the story punishes her. It's because Eliot describes Rosamond so precisely, wittily, and devastatingly that I wince at recognizing myself.
And TV shows have taught me stuff, too. Sitcoms teach me that lying and hiding stuff never works; if I'm straightforward and honest with people, my life gets a lot easier. The elegant plot structures and wordplay I remember from Seinfeld (probably a classic) and Mad About You taught me about art before I ever read Fitzgerald.
I'd argue that the movie The Matrix is a classic; if anyone wants me to expand on that, shoot me an e-mail.
Compare-and-contrast: the CAPAlert guy who marks a movie down for portraying sin, even if the movie shows the sinner punished for his sin. His justification is that the very portrayal of the sin might influence a child who had not previously considered that sin. I'm not certain there are any edifying stories that don't depict bad behavior; there has to be a Goofus to make Gallant look good.
In our everyday lives, sometimes good things happen to bad people and vice versa. So morality plays for children will have to be somewhat unrealistic, and stories for adults, aiming to recreate the familiar, will depict these dismaying outcomes. (I hesitate to say the word "unrealistic." I've just read C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, and his scorning comments on the secular world's use of the word "real" to mean "most unpleasant, whether material or notional" make the word "real" stick in my throat. What a funny, disorienting, doubly-directing book, Lewis's Christian edifications feinting behind the Devil's decreasingly convincing instructions.)
Last night I saw Camus's The Just, a hundred-year-old play about terrorists aiming to overthrow the Tsarist Russian state. [Spoilers ahead.] In the end, only one of them dies, but one goes mad. We as adults watching the play know that none of these people comes to a happy end and Russia never gets free, but within the play there's very little explicit punishment for the plotting and murdering. [End of spoilers.] Does that make the play immoral? I really doubt The Just encourages anyone to become a terrorist.
But the main point of your post, Kristen, was about teaching ourselves to act responsibly and accountably. If I could change one thing about the way my parents raised me, I'd work on that very aspect of my rearing. If they'd let me make little choices and suffer the consequences of choosing wrongly, I'd have been more prepared for the stormy ocean of adult life. I think.
# 11 Mar 2005, 11:09AM: Or Possibly Joke-hovah:
Today's a really unusually wonderful day, weatherwise, in San Francisco. It just calls out for an earthquake from
Jerkhovah. Leonard: "I'm still God, and I hate you!"
# 08 Mar 2005, 04:26PM: Best Email Opening Ever:
Dear Sumana
Anyone as prompt as you are will surely go to heaven.
# 06 Mar 2005, 10:38PM: More On Usury, & Eric And Dylan As Shylocks:
I have not yet seen the new Merchant of Venice movie. While considering watching it, I came across an essay on Shylock.
....The Magna Carta, the basis for English constitutional law, is itself a testament to the growing unpopularity of Jewish money-lending activities. Two clauses in the 1215 document state that if a debtor dies before his debt is paid, neither his heir nor his widow will be responsible for repaying the debt....
In Shylock's final scene, Shakespeare had him act out another stereotype: a ritual murder. Of course, there is no mention in the play that Shylock would use Antonio's blood in any religious ritual. But the audience would have immediately associated the stage action with the myth. Shakespeare seemed to be giving his audience exactly what they expect from a stage Jew. In Portia, the audience got the means to stop the ritual murder because she would not let the Jew shed one drop of Christian blood. The text specifically says "Christian," reinforcing the "blood libel" legends....
# 29 Dec 2004, 11:56AM: There Is A God (yes/no):
Part of my reason for my interest in religions is hereditary; my father, a Hindu priest, has always been a student of world religions. My sociological interest trumps my personal quest for meaning (as I implied to John while misjudging his offer to assuage curiosity). How do people figure out how to live? Well, sometimes religions tell them what to do, but lots of people only follow religions part of the way. They obey some rules but not others. Why?
Anyway.
Here's the PowerPoint description of Judaism. Includes "God has favorites and some nations have a special deal with God", as well as:
- When God tells you what to do, you must do it, even it it seems crazy
- The bible contains a lawbook better than any law we can make today
- God created the world in 6 days
The children of this congregation also have taken field trips to other religious services, including a Reform Jewish Shabbas.
They did not give us the little caps to wear. If we come back, we would probably want to weat them. Do they have a basket of loaners, or would we have to buy our own?
The spirit was a bit different at an Eastern Orthodox Easter service.We visited on Sunday, May 17th 1999, which was the last Sunday beteeen Easter and Ascension. This meant that a major element of the service was the repeated triumphal hymn of Easter: "Christ is risen from the grave, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!" One of our adults commented later that this was not unlike a stadium of football fans greeting the home team: "You know you are visiting the winning team."
Our kids were more impressed by how long the service was. Two hours is a long, long time to stand when you are 12 years old, and some of them may not go on another field trip after this.
What do you believe? Choose!
There is a God (yes/no)
There are many Gods, each person can decide which to pray to (yes/no)
There are many Gods, but only one of them is good (yes/no)
Do pets go to Heaven (yes/no)
Currently I'm interested in the huge multidimensional Venn Diagram describing what I believe and how those beliefs fit into other religions. Evidently I am a Unitarian and I didn't even know it!
"Seeker-sensitive" actually does appear in the descriptions of nondenominational Christian churches in the SF Bay Area - I had previously only read that term in a Real Live Preacher anecdote about conferences among clergy.
In the course of this rambling I found a listing for the SF Quakers and found out how they run their Meeting for Worship, which has no pastor or priest. (I'd love to watch their meetings to check how they avoid the Tar Pit From Hell.) The Quaker meeting description includes the line "this is not a discussion group", which should also be in that song about the country club and the disco as well as the song about the wife and the beautiful house.
The Quaker listing is on the best GeoCities page I've ever seen. Martin Marks recently made me laugh:
Oh yeah, memo to Dan Brown: your novels read like extremely compelling Geocities pages. Please, please, please go take a writing course at your local community college. You are hurting the children.
(I do not know whether Leonard would mind if I embraced a stapler on camera to indulge Mr. Marks. Would it have to be a red Swingline à la Office Space?)
Anyway.
Had a long and interesting conversation with Seth last night. I surprised him and myself with my passionate denunciation of deliberate rootlessness as inflicted on children, in implicit defense of raising children in a religious tradition. So there is some personal quest here, as well as the "look at cute or clever or puzzling things I have found on the web" aspect. I don't know how I want to live my life and all I can do is be honest about it. Wish me luck, if you believe in luck.
# 22 Dec 2004, 05:48PM: Finally Created A "Religion" Category:
Gordon Atkinson has his Nativity story up, and a posthumous baptism discussion that is pretty cordial even if the word "libel" escapes my lips.
# 17 Dec 2004, 04:25PM: I'm Turning Into A Secular Mormon:
Garments and fashion! Baptisms and mission policies! Brigham Young's Gandhi-like concern with home industry! I can see that Times and Seasons is opening LDS up to me in a highly interesting fashion.
# 16 Dec 2004, 04:32PM: Aside From Saints, Psychopaths, And Children:
We're also living in fear.
# 06 Dec 2004, 07:08PM: Aiee!:
Gordon Atkinson! (she squeals as though he is the Beatles)
# 03 Dec 2004, 10:54AM: Unitarians Be Walkin' Down The Street Like This:
Instant Messaging with Leonard about religion:
Sumana: I found out why they don't take vows and oaths
Leonard: uus?
Sumana: no, Quakers
Sumana: sorry
Sumana: no, UUs don't take oaths because they don't believe anything is true
# 30 Nov 2004, 05:02PM: It's Pompousness Night Here at Sumana's:
Which is worse - listless lost apathetic purposelessness or strangled forced direction? The anchor that drowns or the loosed sail that any wind can blow away?
# 30 Nov 2004, 12:33PM: I Experience Cinema, You View Film, He Watches Movies:
I should have checked CAPAlert before taking my mom to Ray; it would have warned us about the excessive sex. Probably the only major movies out that I could comfortably watch with my mom are The Incredibles and SpongeBob SquarePants and my sister wanted to see neither. I believe the last movie that my entire nuclear family saw together was Air Force One in 1997.
While we pored over the free DC weekly paper's movie listings. I saw some arty Iranian film and commenced to needless mockery of Kiarostami. "Oh look, I put a camera in a truck and drive it along a dusty road for two hours and that's a movie. They're all named The Children of the Olive Groves or something. I'm Iranian, I'm censored, look at me."
I think it would be funny if Kiarostami were helping the Iranian reform movement by lulling the hard-liners to sleep with his boring movies.
# 23 Nov 2004, 09:34PM: It's A Faaaaaaake:
Leonard and I watched a bit of an America's Test Kitchen about Chicken Diavola, which does indeed mean "devil-style."
CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL: So tell us a little bit about Chicken Diavola. Diavola. Am I saying that right?
JULIA COLIN: Yes. It's "Diavola," meaning chicken of the damned. To make this requires that you damn your soul to hell.
[pause]
KIMBALL: Okay, what do we do first?
COLIN: Well, there's this oath that you sign in blood.
KIMBALL: Does it have to be my own blood?
COLIN: Not necessarily. We actually found that pig's blood works best. It has a certain viscosity that we really liked.
KIMBALL: Uh-huh.
COLIN: We tested about fifteen different bloods. A lot of people think virgin's blood would be the blood you'd use here, but that's actually pretty thin. You don't want something that'll just run off the page. Pig's blood really has that earthiness and stickiness, so that's what we use.
# 18 Nov 2004, 06:32PM: Wish List:
Life is suffering, as Gautama Buddha and George Orwell both said, and the less you want the happier you'll be, to paraphrase Buddha but probably not Orwell. That actually worked for me when I was younger, I think, but today I have been letting strangers get to me -- which means I want their approval -- and haven't meditated on nonreaction.
Susanna, Leonard's sister, has now twice requested a wishlist from me. Sorry for the procrastination, Susanna. I keep this wishlist and try to update it before my birthday and before Christmas. I'm glad that I've cut down on the size of my wishlist over the past few years.
I think I wanted for nothing once, at least nothing tangible, and I miss that. I was ignorant, and didn't feel in charge of my own life. How long does desire take to die when you never feel agency? I remember coming to the dorms and feeling the most enormous pleasure at choosing my own food in the dining commons. Now Leonard has spoiled me; I have tasted his fairy food and might waste away for the want of it. I've gotten picky, the way Ben Franklin bragged that he never did. I wish I didn't know how bland mediocre food is, how much more interesting other jobs could be. I want to forget everything extraordinary so I can be content.
# 10 Nov 2004, 07:59PM: Not To Mention The Original Big Book:
Two of my favorite Christianity bloggers: Real Live Preacher and
Slacktivist. I imagine that the Preacher, a.k.a. Gordon Atkinson, would enjoy Douglas Coupland's book All Families Are Psychotic, and now I find that Fred Clark of Slacktivist enjoyed Infinite Jest. Leonard read that recently and I acted irrationally hostile towards him and it whenever I saw the book. I get irrationally angry at people who are doing things I don't have the guts to do. In this case that's both the reader and the writer of a Big Book. When did I stop reading huge books? When I started commuting on BART?
# 27 Apr 2003, 01:58PM: More Silly Movie Review Reviews:
Ebert says a bloggy thing in a 1998 review of a half-star flick: "The plot involves ... excuse me
for a moment, while I laugh uncontrollably at having written the
words 'the plot involves.' I'm back." The CAPAlert guy CAPAlerted
me to Extreme Days, "an extreme signal to an world
saturated with extreme vulgarity." His review included the note:
"This movie could have very easily been rated G. Indeed, it earned a
score of 92 which is midrange of the CAP scoring range (100 to 87)
earned by G-rated movies. I suppose it was given a PG because of the
'thematic elements': open submission to God's Wisdom and Will."
Curious, I looked for more info on IMDB, and found many user
comments. Most are enthusiastic young Christians saying that the
movie is not too preachy, and great for youth ministries, and perfect
to watch with friends, saved or unsaved. (Example: "good youth group
movie, or just to watch at your house w/ buds. you don't have to
fastforward through anything. oh yeah!") A few comments call it
boring and repetitious. (Example: "If this is the only video
remaining in the video store, walk away!!!")
Neither set of
comments swayed me; in any case, I know I won't see it because it has
"Extreme" in the title.
# 08 Apr 2003, 09:02AM: Father Blog Stories:
I've been reading G.K. Chesterton; his Father Brown stories tickle my fondness for high-concept mysteries, and his style is great, but the preaching gets on my nerves. Here's a modern mystery tale of weblogs, secret meetings, skulduggery, and betrayal. (via Electrolite)
In other links, Frances might enjoy Teresa Nielsen Hayden's guide to "judging the dubiousness of saints", and Rob Walker goes a little nuts over new Humvee ads. Walker cites Gregg Easterbrook with coining the category "FUV" in "Axle of Evil", a monster article explaining reasons why SUVs are abominable.
"What does it say about the United States that there are now millions of people who want to drive an anti-social automobile? Huge numbers of Americans will pay thousands of dollars extra for vehicles that visually declare, "I have serious psychological problems." (Though maybe we are better off having this declared.)"
# 24 Apr 2002, 11:19PM:
Yes, this week's Enterprise had such heavy-handed allegory
that I'm surprised it didn't implode upon reaching critical mass. But
I liked it anyway. "Look at the brave, stoic face that these
Palestinians, er, Japanese, er, Suluban put on in their internment
camp!" They were all so earnest -- I miss that.
Marisa and I discussed our favorite Star Trek: The Next
Generation episodes before Linguistics discussion today. I
forgot to mention that one from maybe the sixth or seventh season,
where Riker thinks he's going mad. "A Matter of Point of View" or
something? Oh, I miss TNG.
The West Wing from this week isn't even worth discussion.
Instead -- hi, Camille, Mike Popovic -- I'll give you my take on the
most recent 7th Heaven.
First of all, Ruthie's preternatural, Cassandra-like (hi, Angel!) power of knowledge is getting scary. As Leonard put it, "In every episode, the sinister hand of Aaron Spelling can be found." Is the WB planning an Angel crossover (which would, of course, not be canon)?
[Oh, that reminds me: tonight, during the West Wing interviews-mixed-with-show-clips metashow, which now that I think about it reminds me of Shades of Gray (the awful TNG episode, not the Billy Joel song, which I like), Leonard said that we could infer the show's internal chronology from the people we saw interviewed. I said, "That's not canon!"]
Back to Seventh Heaven.
It's Melrose Place crossed with Wodehouse, this show. All the scheming! The deceptions, well-meaning and no! (Case in point: the Wodehousian "Gemette" scandal this week.) The silly romances! The people who gape in astonishment! I see more interesting facial expressions in an hour with Seventh Heaven than in a year with my family.
Now, the Jew factor. What the heck is going on here? Sarah's family is even more sitcom-wacko than the Camdens. And doesn't it weird you, faithful viewer, that Sarah, the Jew, is the one who really wants the ring, the valuable object? Why is Sarah the greedy Jew? Is it just because she's used to wealth? And why is she so wealthy, anyway? Are rabbis rich? Disturbing questions!
Mary and Lucy. Who else can't stand them? Are you with me? They aren't pretty, they're man-hungry, they lack common sense, they're vain, and yet I suppose one is necessary to counterpoint how basically good the other characters are. But I could do without, say, Lucy.
In the next episode, Minister Camden basically says, "you two aren't married, so you shouldn't have sex." I assume that Matt's not going to make the principled "premarital sex isn't necessarily wrong" stand. Pity.
# 08 Apr 2002, 10:21PM:
I found myself watching The Full Night of Seventh Heaven tonight. Matt got married! To a Jewish girl! Her father's a rabbi! And their families don't know yet, and think they're just engaged! Next week: Matt's father, Minister Camden, blows up at Matt's conversion to Judaism!
My Lord, this show is great. The best trash I've seen in years.
# 07 Apr 2002, 11:11PM:
I still have to clean the kitchen floor, and I have less time than I'd thought because of the silly time change. USians have a Daylight Savings thing going where we switch our clocks twice a year, in case you didn't know.
Leonard and I watched Keeping the Faith (his first time) and Casablanca (my first time) over the weekend. Casablanca is the Hamlet of film -- I kept reminding myself, "that wasn't a cliché until they did it." Of course, it was quite enjoyable, although I wish I hadn't known the ending ahead of time.
By the way, while renting the video at Reel, I asked the clerk whether my copy held the letterboxed or reformatted version of the film. He informed me that movies' aspect ratio only changed to the current (widescreen) format after the advent of television, and as such, any video of Casablanca is neither reformatted nor letterboxed, but in its original, TV-shaped format. I had forgotten those bits of trivia, and slunk away, shown up as the cinemaphile poseur I was.
I am surprised at how well Keeping the Faith held up to a second viewing; I even noticed a running end-of-scene bit of camerawork/cinematography in which the camera stays focused on a space which a character has just left. I'm not sure what that motif means, but it's there.
The last time I watched that movie I was a Hindu and I saw it with Dan. Now the "that's what faith is" speech makes me wince a little. Right now I miss believing -- knowing that there's a God, as I did just one scant year ago. I don't know who to call out to anymore.
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